My Plex is still just showing multiple versions of episodes. So for Season 01 it shows 24 episodes but there are 58 individual files that I have, each one different.
Before someone tells me to update my server and player- I don’t even know how to do that honestly. I have Plex server running on OpenMediaVault and followed step by step instructions from a YouTuber on how to get that installed- but nowhere can I find how to actually update the Plex server in docker or Portainer or whatever.
I sure appreciate any assistance anyone can provide. I’ve been doing this kind of thing for 20 years and sometimes I still just can’t figure something out, I’m definitely not computer illiterate.
Mind sharing how you’ve named those files?
The following schema should work just fine…
TV Shows <- the folder linked to your tv-show library
The Twilight Zone (1985)
Season 01
The Twilight Zone (1985) - s01e01 - Shatterday.ext <- with the optional episode title
The Twilight Zone (1985) - s01e02.ext <- without the optional episode title
The Twilight Zone (1985) - s01e03.ext
...
The Twilight Zone (1985) - s01e59.ext
Where .ext refers to your files’ extensions.
As for
Let me be that one… you definitely should update your server.
This version is dating back to late 2019 / early 2020.
There should be a simple update button in the admin interface of your OMV.
The Twilight Zone (1985) S01E01a - Shatterday.mkv
The Twilight Zone (1985) S01E01b - A Little Peace And Quiet.mkv
The Twilight Zone (1985) S01E02a - Wordplay.mkv
The Twilight Zone (1985) S01E02b - Dreams For Sale.mkv
The Twilight Zone (1985) S01E02c - Chameleon.mkv
…
The Twilight Zone (1985) S01E24b - The Last Defender Of Camelot.mkv
I have tried renaming the first two files to match what the other thread said, and all it did was make episode 2 in Plex show 4 items instead of 3. Episode 1 still showed 2 files.
If I have to rename every file an individual episode all the way to 58 that’s fine, easy enough, I just don’t understand how there are 24 episodes but they’re all different and split. I guess my confusion is- why was this show released this way? So if someone says hey play episode 23- what actual episode is that?
As for updating- as I said Plex is running in this Portainer/Docker thing on OMV, and I have looked all over for an easy-peasy way to update it to no avail. Now portainer itself needs updating and I’m afraid if I click around too much the whole dang thing will go up in smoke.
Drop the extra letters… it’s not s01e01a, s01e01b… but s01e01 and s01e02…
Plex is only going by the sXXeYY pattern… if you have 2 files containing s01e01, Plex will treat both of them as different versions (duplicates) of episode 1 of season 1.
As for docker – in my view you just added an unnecessary level of complexity to your setup.
The Twilight Zone (1985) S01E01-E02 - Shatterday and A Little Piece and Quiet.mkv
The Twilight Zone (1985) S01E03-E05 - Wordplay Dreams for Sale and Chameleon.mkv
I appreciate your help on this matter. I’ll rename the files. No idea why someone would have named them this way, but easy enough to fix.
I’ll look into updating the server, thanks for that link. From what I understood, there was something (docker/portainer) needed to actually run Plex on my machine- I guess not? The guy on YouTube made it sound like you can’t just install plex in OMV directly.
Yes that’s how the episodes appear to be structured from the company that produced the show… but how you display one episode which is actually two episodes, that was really my question. And as it turns out, every different plot is actually its own episode altogether. Thanks!
Well yes, but A and B are two entirely different plots. They aren’t even sequels, I don’t think. I think they were just released on the same day, probably so they could later broadcast more shows as reruns? I have no idea. Honestly I still don’t even understand what a “season” is entirely, tv shows are just weird to me. Until a few years ago I didn’t even really realize that a tv show had a beginning and an end, and was really just one really long movie. When I was a kid we went outside and rode bikes and stuff, I guess I wasn’t raised on TV to know this stuff. Anyway lol…
Named like shown Plex will show two separate episodes and draw down the metadata for both. They will appear as two, but play as one… or will appear as 3 and play as one… or appear as 12 and play as one… all depending how you name them.
It’s confusing…
Trust me…
it works.
In future - rip every single episode from disc - not the big one.
Seems the two of you got confused
The OP has 58 files but named them incorrectly… therefore only 24 were showing inside Plex.
Naming the 58 files according to how they’re organized on TheTVDb.com (link above) will fix this.
I guess I was wrong, at least some of them are sequels. S01E6 and S01E7, 6 plays right into 7. I’ve never watched this show so I had no idea, but wondered why I was missing one file. Those two are joined as one file and the end of 6 transitions into 7. So if the files are joined together as you suggest, how do you play episode 7 in plex? As far as my interface on the computer, it appears I would have to play episode 6 and fast forward to 7.
The other way would be to name the episode the first in the string - then skip all the episodes until you get to the first in the next string… then Plex won’t list all the episodes in the string and you’ll probably be doing a lot of editing to include all those episodes in a magnum description wall…
Wikipedia means squat.
Plex matches TV Shows to TVDB/TMDB - not Wikipedia.
Think I’ll just split that one joined file, and rename everything episode 1-59 haha
Thank you!
I’d never visited the TVDB website before today, never really thought about the mechanism which plex pulls the data from there, and how it’s entered in etc. Guess I should have figured some people do weird things with file names, remembering back in the days of Napster etc. where you’ve got 400 trillion different ways to name the same file. Kind of ridiculous, but iTunes has really dumbed me down here…they do all the sorting work for me, so I have forgotten how things used to be back in the before times.
That’s how it shows on the TVDB link that was posted, no? It shows 59 different individual episodes.
I’m not quite sure what you mean when you say I’ll never get clean edits, or what ‘use naming’ means? I currently have 58 .mkv files for season one, with episodes 6 and 7 being one .mkv file. So I just need to split that file and then rename the filenames to correspond with the TVDB listing, like the other person suggested.
Ok now I see plex only shows 24 episodes (same as wikipedia) even though TVDB shows 59 episodes- so even if I feed plex 59 files, its still never going to show more than 24 episodes for this show. So now I’m really confused, and have no idea how it’s supposed to work.
The BluRay has those last two episodes joined, but of course TVDB lists them separately. Name a string of episodes and tell Plex where to start and end and they’ll display like:
I sure as heck didn’t want to go in there and try to butcher two episodes apart (or 59), so the naming trick made the most sense. Also consider those two episodes are made to run together like a Movie. Those 59 TZs ain’t.
So - if you’ve got 59 episodes in one magnum file - that’s unfortunate - doable, but it’s not going to be nice any way you deal with it.
